Challenges In Wireless Technology

Kumari Poonam VII Semester Department Of Information science & Engineering HKES Poojya Doddappa Appa College Of Engineering Aiwan-E-Shahi Road, Gulbarga Email: bhattadpoonam@yahoomail.com

Abstract:
Wireless technology has created a revolution in todays world.It offers many features like mobility, portability. Wireless inspite of many uses,is not perfect.There are limitations, political, technical difficulties.That may ultimately prevent wireless from reaching their full potential.Two issues are incompatible standards & device limitations. These and many other challenges are discussed in the following section. standards do not exists.Hence wireless is unable to provide ubiquitous access to data.Device limitations also restrict the free flow of data .The small lcd on a mobile telephone is inadequate for displaying more than a few lines of text.In addition ,most mobile wireless devices cannot access the vast majority of www sites on the internet.The browers use a special languague,wireless markup language (WML) instead of HTML. Wireless will succeed because it will be integrated into a variety of devices that can meet a variety of needs. The growth of wireless applications brings exciting possibilities and significant challenges in terms of security and management of the data and network access that will be wandering around in the big danger.Analysts say wireless LANs can be easily accessed by neighbors - friendly or not. According to analysts, information technology managers can provide robust security by making sure wireless users are authenticated, preferably with a user name and password as well as a token. They also say encryption should be used end-toend in a connection.

Introduction:
Let's assume that we want to build a very high-speed, ubiquitous wireless data network. Most likely,no one wireless device will be able to meet every need.The potential of wireless can met but not with a single product. A device using one standard will not work in area where the deployed techology Is different eg: is the inability to use bluetooth & 802.11b in the same device.These are the problems when industry wide

Security can even be made strong enough to allow purchases or money transfers over the Web, banks and retailers say. And need strong protection. Encrypting connections from end to end requires a developer to consider every device used to access a network, users and analysts say. In addition, the security standards of each wireless network carrier must be understood. Many analysts say they agree that WAP 1.1 presents problems, because a wireless transmission is vulnerable to a hack at the WAP gateway server. Under the current standard, the WAP gateway server sits inside the premises of the wireless carrier.

Without directional interference problems exponentially worse.

antennae, become

6. Create standard ad hoc routing and MAC layers that work for large meshed networks of mobile nodes with high throughput and low delay over many hops. 7. Reduce power consumption of the entire system, especially user devices.

8. Coordinate individual radios so that

Quality of Service can be guaranteed in a mesh network. 9. Solve the hidden-terminal problem, which is really a question of coordinating a large number of radios to reduce interference. 10. Provide the fast handoffs that will be required for continuous mobile connectivity, as cell sizes will continue to decrease. 11. Eliminate outdated systems that tie up spectrum (broadcast television and radio, any analog system, any system that is not spread spectrum). 12. Too Much Of Wireless demands changes. I will discuss each of these challenges in turn, point out likely approaches to solve these problems, and discuss the advances required to make these approaches viable. 1. Providing high Level Of security: Reliability, secured and correct data is the need of the hour. Also is biggest challenge to the wireless world.

The Top 12 Challenges in Wireless: 1. Providing high level of security,

since wireless technologies do not provide reliable service, extensive search is needed to provide services much nearer to the performance of wired services. 2. Integrate unlicensed wireless securely and transparently into existing networking systems, such as wired enterprise Ethernets, the cellular system, and the public switched telephone network. 3. Develop algorithms for maximizing system throughput and capacity in large meshed networks. 4. Provide a cheap, wired backbone to enable inexpensive connectivity to the wireless mesh. 5. Provide cheap, smart antennae and the protocols that go with them.

Proper authentication, well designed password storage mechanisms, firewalls, hack proof access to important data, should be taken as prime objectives while designing any wireless technology. 2. Integration of wireless data into existing systems: The wireless meshed network must intercommunicate with all the existing legacy systems out there. The interconnections need to be efficient and economically practical. The meshed network can't require the legacy systems to be extensively modified. Several unexpected problems have come up. For example, TCP/IP was originally designed to run over lousy, highly variable delay networks and still deliver reasonable performance. The biggest problem for most users of TCP/IP, however, turned out to be that it was not efficient under the load of multiple users. The design was changed to make it efficient under load now it doesn't work well over lousy networks with highly variable delays. There are two avenues of attack for these types of problems, and both should be followed through in parallel:

transparently into the existing cellular systems is a problem within reach of a solution. Integration of WLAN systems into existing operators' service portfolios is also a difficult problem that is spawning its own industry, whose designs are rapidly becoming standardized .The wireless data industry has many challenges ahead. Advances in other fields are beginning to provide the necessary foundations for overcoming them in the next few years. The problems presented by unlicensed wireless data are some of the most challenging in the wireless world.

3. Maximizing system throughput in a meshed wireless network: This is the key problem that must be solved to provide high-speed ubiquitous wireless coverage in an efficient manner. It essentially takes all of the problems and puts them together to produce the best and most efficient system. This is an interesting problem because the theoretical upper bounds have yet to be convincingly determined. Even to approach a reasonable estimate, we must make many simplifying assumptions. My guess is that the theoretical limits defining this problem will be determined within the next few years, but that practical solutions approaching these limits are still a decade away. 3. Cheap wired backbone: We would think that with the surplus of fiber supposedly installed in the world, connecting a wireless meshed

Modify the existing protocols to be more flexible. Make the wireless mesh network look more like a wired network with predictable delays and minimal losses.

Several other systems integration opportunities, ripe for solutions, present themselves. For example, voice over IP (VoIP) over WLAN and integration of this feature

network of radios to the wired backbone would be no problem. Wrong. The apparent glut of fiber is really a glut of bandwidth between specific points and an absolute dearth of high-speed connectivity everywhere else. Meshed wireless networks can help solve this problem because they can convey the signals to where the fiber exists. Because the fiber is hardly anywhere (less than 1 percent of commercial buildings have fiber on premises today and less than 5 percent of buildings have fiber that actually passes by their front doors), a cheap, wired backbone that is also relatively ubiquitous would create a significant savings. A huge unmet need exists for highspeed wired connections, and wireless networks will suffer because of it. In return for the monopolies the telephone companies have, it seems a small price to pay to require them to provide this service. The phone companies cannot be entirely blamed, however. Competition has not brought about the desired results. Cable companies have huge amounts of bandwidth available over their infrastructure but have been able to provide only small data pipes for their customers. Something is wrong with the incentives in the system. This is probably the most difficult problem on the entire list, because it requires changes in both the government and the free market. 5. Smart antennae: This is one of the key areas that wireless engineers have yet to put into common use, especially in the area of

mesh network design, where it would be extremely valuable this problem becomes extremely challenging when the radios in the mesh network are moving. The research in this area has been excellent, and the theoretical limits of the technology in stationary situations are well understood. Achieving a practical implementation that comes anywhere near the theoretical limit in a mobile ad hoc environment, however, is largely uncharted territory. With increases in signal-processing power, approaching the theoretical limit at a reasonable cost should be possible in the near future. Knowing the theoretical limits may be intellectually satisfying but is insufficient in a commercial environment unless you can implement a design that produces these results in a commercially viable configuration. This task is exponentially more difficult and, of course, more satisfying and rewarding.

6. Designing mesh network protocols: Designing efficient mesh networking protocols is critical. The industry still has a long way to go to standardize on anything approaching an efficient routing protocol for mesh networks. The simplest way to approach mesh networks today would be to implement a meshed routing protocol on top of existing WLAN protocols. Progress has been made in this direction. Without some modifications at the MAC or physical layer, however, this approach is doomed to

system inefficiencies and possible total collapse in large networks, because of MAC layer problems The MAC and routing layers must be designed in conjunction with each other to wring out the last bits of efficiency. If it is not done carefully, a design that works eminently well in a WLAN will collapse in a large meshed network. To produce the ideal solution, the physical layer should also be designed from scratch. Individually maximizing the design of each layer is not sufficient. An efficient design must include maximized system throughput. These challenges make the design work a difficult, Pioneering work has been done but many fundamental problems in this area are still not understood. 7. Power consumption: The need to reduce power consumption is one of the most challenging and interesting topics in wireless engineering, which not only tackles theoretical problems, but also requires complicated physical solutions before any real system can be implemented. The designer is always trying to push the entire system to its theoretical limits. Today's cell phone solutions have made huge strides in conserving battery power. This has been achieved with a relatively fixed throughput. The next challenge is to keep this trend intact while increasing the throughput by several orders of magnitude. One method of decreasing power consumption is to bring the radios closer together or, in other words, to create a ubiquitous mesh network. To

bring radios closer together, they must become exponentially cheaper, as the number required increases (at best) by the square of the ratio of decrease in their average separation. Thus, using mesh architecture, you can decrease the power consumption of a radio system simply by making the radios cheaper. There is also a great push to increase the power density of batteries or other power-storage devices for reasons of portability. Wireless protocols and system design should always strive to minimize power consumption. It is one of the key criteria when building a system. In a wired system, this requirement is usually ignored because it has little effect on the performance of the system. For a wireless mobile system, carefully managing this specification is crucial to making a usable system. 8. Coordinating QoS: We promote the idea of providing Quality of Service by increasing the available bandwidth. That solution works well for wired connections, where you can easily increase the additional bandwidth or add a link that won't interfere with the original one. For wireless, however, you want to make the most efficient possible use of the airwaves because you can't just magically add more links between two radios to increase bandwidth. The research that has already been done using asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) to determine how to provide QoS can now be applied to the real problem of making wireless links more efficient. The truly difficult problem, which has only begun to be

addressed, is how to provide QoS in a meshed network over multiple links between multiple radios. Although some preliminary work has been done in this area practical solutions have yet to be produced. The additional level of complexity makes this an interesting problem to solve.

9. Hidden-terminal problem: This problem is particularly difficult to overcome for a large group of meshed radios. It occurs because a radio needs to receive a signal that is above the noise level by a certain amount before it can decode it correctly. To maximize the capacity of a mesh network, you never want a packet to fail. When a "hidden" terminal transmits a packet without coordinating with other nearby radios, it can easily interfere with another conversation going on nearby. As the load on the network increases, interference increases, and the corresponding efficiency of the network decreases, eventually driving the throughput of the network to zero as everyone tries to transmit all the time. There are three potential ways to fix this problem, and all of them are difficult. Advances in processing power will enable implementation in the near future, however.

The first solution is to coordinate all the radios' transmissions. The problem with this is that radios can interfere with each other but may be incapable of talking to

each other; therefore, it may be impossible for them to directly coordinate with each other. The solution is to coordinate with their distant neighbors over the network. In cellular networks this is done by programming in different frequencies to be used by the radios in different positions. New algorithms need to be invented to support mobile mesh networks. This increases the level of complexity, because the radios must know where they physically reside before they can perform this coordination. (Of course, this can be determined wirelessly using a system such as GPS one wireless technology helping another.) Another way to address the hidden-terminal problem is to change the carrier-to-noise ratio (CN) to a negative value. This simplifies one dimension of the problem because the hop distance (HD) can now be larger than 2*RI, and radios can successfully talk to each other from farther away than they can interfere with one another. This simplifies coordination, but does not entirely solve the problem. Although difficult to implement with spread spectrum radios and advanced signal processing, this reduction in CN is possible. Nothing is free, however. When CN is negative, the next layer of the onion is the socalled "near-far" problem. To decode a signal with a negative

CN, all signals must arrive at the receiver with approximately the same power level so that N, the noise generated by the other radio signals, does not become too large. One large nearby signal can drown out all the small signals from distant radios. Some form of coordination still must be implemented. The best way to perform this coordination has yet to be determined. The final proposed solution takes into account the fact that N is not really noise; it is the sum of the signals of all other radios. Advanced signalprocessing algorithms can take advantage of this and effectively mask the competing signals, thereby greatly reducing N and effectively increasing CN to reduce the chance of interference. This is not as easy as it sounds .The received signals must be processed once for each interfering signal, as one cannot tell a priori which signal is destined for the receiver. With exponential improvements in signalprocessing power, this problem can be solved in the coming years. It can be further simplified by supporting smart antennae at each radio.

spectrum it provides. Reusing spectrum every few miles or every few hundred feet provides an essentially unlimited capacity for wireless communications. The smaller the cell size, the larger the communication capacity per unit area. This imposes huge pressure for very high-speed, short-distance radios. Thus, as cell size naturally shrinks, the available data rate increases. This is exemplified by the large deployment of WLAN in homes and enterprises. This large market will drive down the cost of deploying cellular-type systems. Today the market is rapidly approaching the point where it is less expensive to put a WLAN node on every streetlight than to deploy a conventional cellular system to cover the same area (especially when taking into account wireless backhaul). So why isn't this done today? The main limiting factor is the ability to provide fast handoffs over cells sized a few hundred feet in diameter. Typical vehicle speeds of a hundred feet per second mean switching cells every few seconds. This seems impossible to contemplate today, but think about the hundreds of millions of decisions a 2-GHz processor can make in a fraction of a second. The ability to find the radio in the next cell and to hand off to it in this same short period of time seems eminently feasible. Standards bodies today are defining the interfaces required to make this possible

10. Fast handoffs: One of the greatest system design concepts in the evolution of wireless technology is the notion of cellular deployment and the huge reuse of

11. Eliminating inefficient usage of spectrum: This is one of the most difficult problems to solve, because constituencies that have monopolies on using the spectrum benefit greatly from them and will not easily give them up. This problem has only two solutions, and both must be applied with care. The first is slowly and steadily to force technologies to change by providing a combination of the right incentives and the right threats. Many countries have taken this approach, attempting to redefine the type of usage allocated to many areas of spectrum. This reallocation of spectrum is slow, with the "chipping away" of the inefficient usage of spectrum proceeding at a rate estimated to be less than one-fifth of 1 percent per year. At this rate, it will take more than three centuries to free up half of the spectrum suitable for ubiquitouscoverage mesh networks. Fortunately, this process is beginning to accelerate as a result of the hard work of many dedicated people. In the long run, these efforts will have a huge effect on communication capacity for individuals. The second solution is a technical one, exemplified today by new standards defined for new types of spread spectrum radios, particularly the new rules covering ultra-wideband (UWB) radios these radios spread their signals over many gigahertz of spectrum, at such a low power level and duty rate that other users of this spectrum are unaware they are transmitting. Other modulation techniques allowing

multiple uses of the same spectrum (with manageable interference) are in various stages of development. 12. Too Much Of Wireless. If in a room their exists too many things that work on wireless principles then it leads to collision of frequency on which the devices work. For e.g.: Mobile phones, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, T.V, D.V.D, wireless landline operate on similar frequency. Hence we need to fix the frequency ranges on which wireless devices work or else they may not work correctly.

Conclusion:
In this short article we discussed various challenges that await the upcoming wireless technologies. Each problem has a possible solution and only needs to be tested and practically implemented. Once these problems get solved then it will be world that will be connected wirelessly.

References:
Michel. W. Ritter Currently working on Mobility Of Network. William Stalling Author Of best-selling wireless communications and networks.